Sigmund Freud Quotes
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Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as right in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force.
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The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
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America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.
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What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.
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What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children.
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Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.
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When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
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The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
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The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.
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But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.
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But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.
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Let us consider the polarity of love and hate.... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.
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The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.
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Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.
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What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
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Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.
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When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
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Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.
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In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
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The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.
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Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
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The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
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Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry.
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To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.